that I ever did. I couldn't learn to play the
violin and the musical glasses if I were to try, and I am sure that I
should never go out into the woodshed to try to rhyme _sun_ with _fun_;
no, Gretchen, all such follies as these I should _shun_. What difference
does it make whether a word rhymes with one word or another?"

To the eye of the poetic and musical German girl the dead volcano, with
its green base and frozen rivers and dark, glimmering lines of carbon,
seemed like a fairy tale, a celestial vision, an ascent to some city of
crystal and pearl in the sky. To her foster mother the stupendous scene
was merely a worthless waste, as to Wordsworth's unspiritual wanderer:

"A primrose by the river's brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."

She was secretly pleased at Gretchen's wonder and surprise at the new
country, but somehow she felt it her duty to talk querulously, and to
check the flow of the girl's emotions, which she did much to excite. Her
own life had been so circumscribed and hard that the day seemed to be too
bright to be speaking the truth. She peered into the sky for a cloud, but
there was none, on this dazzling Oregon morning. The trail now opened for
a long way before the eyes of the travelers. Far ahead gleamed the
pellucid waters of the Columbia, or Oregon. Half-way between them and the
broad, rolling river a dark, tall figure appeared.

"Gretchen?"

"What, mother?"

"Gretchen, look! There goes the Yankee schoolmaster. Came way out here
over the mountains to teach the people of the wilderness, and all for
nothing, too. That shows that people have souls--some people have. Walk
right along beside me, proper-like. You needn't ever tell any one that I
ain't your true mother. If I ain't ashamed of you, you needn't be ashamed
of me. I wish that you were my own girl, now that you have said that you
love me more than anybody else in the world. That remark kind o' touched
me. I know that I sometimes talk hard, but I mean well, and I have to tell
you the plain truth so as to do my duty by you, and then I won't have
anything to reflect upon.

"Just look at him! Straight as an arrow! They say that his folks are
rich. Come out here way over the mountains, and is just going to teach
school in a log school-house--all made of logs and sods and mud-plaster,
adobe they call it--a graduate of Harvard College, too."

A long, dark object appeared in the trees covered with bark and moss.
Behind these trees was a waterfall, over which hung the crowns of pines.
The sunlight sifted through the odorous canopy, and fell upon the strange,
dark object that lay across the branching limbs of two ancient trees.

Gretchen stopped again.

"Mother, what is that?"

"A grave--an Indian grave."

The Indians bury their dead in the trees out here, or used to do so. A
brown hawk arose from the mossy coffin and winged its way wildly into the
sunny heights of the air. It had made its nest on the covering of the
body. These new scenes were all very strange to the young German girl.

The trail was bordered with young ferns; wild violets lay in beds of
purple along the running streams, and the mountain phlox with its kindling
buds carpeted the shelving ways under the murmuring pines. The woman and
girl came at last to a wild, open space; before them rolled the Oregon,
beyond it stretched a great treeless plain, and over it towered a gigantic
mountain, in whose crown, like a jewel, shone a resplendent glacier.

Just before them, on the bluffs of the river, under three gigantic
evergreens, each of which was more than two hundred feet high, stood an
odd structure of logs and sods, which the builders called the Sod
School-house. It was not a sod school-house in the sense in which the term
has been applied to more recent structures in the treeless prairie
districts of certain mid-ocean States; it was rudely framed of pine, and
was furnished with a pine